All Lights Out for Earth Hour

The World Wild Fund is reporting that 19 state and 48 U.S. cities have pledged to turn off their lights for one hour at 8:30 p.m. local time on March 27, 2010. (We’re talking the governments of these cities; they aren’t going to FORCE an outage or anything.)

This will be the third annual Earth Hour event, which apparently inspired about 80 million people in the United States alone to participate last year. Here’s some more information in the form of the organization’s official video. It is especially cool to see lights going dim in Las Vegas.

So far, here are the states that have committed officially: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin. (That’s three times the number that participated last year.)